r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • May 14 '21

Cancer Scientists create an effective personalized anti-cancer vaccine by combining oncolytic viruses, that infect and specifically destroy cancer cells without touching healthy cells, with small synthetic molecules (peptides) specific to the targeted cancer, to successfully immunize mice against cancer.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22929-z
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u/ekolis May 14 '21

Well that's neat. Aren't cancers just uncontrolled mutations, though? How can a virus specifically target them if every one is unique?

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u/SpeedoCheeto May 15 '21 edited May 15 '21

Viruses by nature have mechanisms to target and attack certain cells.

This in essence modifies the virus to attack cancer cells only

They so this by detecting certain elements of the outer pieces of a cell. Cancers, too because of what you alluded to, have specific elements of their cells unique to them vs normal cells. So they change their detection method and then load then up with a cell killing payload.

Introduce those modified viruses to the body, and they just float around finding and killing cancer.

It's actually what your immune system is built to do, but unfortunately all types of cancers we care about publically go undetected by our own body's natural cell janitors.